Symantec aims to stop companies from buying storage products by making them adopt its next phase of de-duplication strategy designed to help organizations reduce data, management complexity, as well as infrastructure.

In fact, Symantec executives on Thursday revealed the company now also strongly promotes its “stop buying storage philosophy” claiming that in using de-duplication, customers can realize “Return on Yesterday” (ROY) or getting more return out of their existing systems and extending their usual life.

Edler Panlilio, enterprise sales manager of Symantec Philippines, said de-duplication strategy is like putting data storage on a diet.

“De-duplication will help you use or manage what you have. It will help you cope with the challenge of realizing investments made today but also in the past years,” he said.

Quoting reports from Gartner, Panlilio said IT budgets are flattening out since 2008 as an effect of the global economic crunch but the challenges associated with IT storage are not decreasing.

Panlilio said among the common storage challenges are consolidation, getting rid of islands of storage and the reduction on storage spending.

He identified four key strategies so businesses can stop buying storage and start optimizing their existing storage assets. And these are: “Implement de-duplication; storage resource management; adopt thin provisioning; and archive for optimization.”

Symantec’s strategy on de-duplication is all about reducing duplicate data, while storage resource management is to identify and reclaim unused storage capacity. The thin provisioning refers to provisioning storage that IT already owns effectively, and the archive for optimization is to move older data to lower-cost storage.

Richard Velasco, Symantec Philippines’ manager for systems engineering, explained that by employing Symantec’s four key strategies, organizations can spend less on storage well into the future and will only have to purchase new capacity when they have fully optimized the capacity they already have.

“What de-duplication does is that it reduces multiple copies of a file but it would still be available for others,” Velasco said, noting the strategy also works even to companies that have inter-island branches and maintains data access control standards.

Velasco added de-duplication provides more efficiency by decreasing time to backup the system and all four key strategies can work with all kinds of storage systems and devices.

He said with Symantec’s storage management solutions, organizations can measure, monitor and optimize their existing storage assets to significantly extend their useful life and reduce the growth rate of stored data.

“Symantec’s strategy provides visibility on the data space you are using. Our strategy aims to help companies reclaim their unclaimed space without disruptions,” he said. “That’s why companies should think very hard in spending money on storage because they can now reduce 40 per cent to 80 per cent storage space.”

Panlilio said the return on investment (ROI) in implementing Symantec’s de-duplication strategy is estimated at around six months as it can cut at least one-half of a company’s data backup storage.

The executives said Symantec is moving de-duplication closer to information sources by integrating the technology into its information management platforms such as NetBackup, Backup Exec and Enterprise Vault, and centrally managing native de-duplication as well as third-party de-duplication appliances.